How to Accurately Determine Keyword Competition in SEO

While targeting any of the keywords for your blog post, it is important to know the keyword Competition.

Without knowing about the competition, you can't just rank higher and drive more traffic.

I know, there are tons of keywords, which have high search volume. You can't just target them all. You have to choose a keyword with decent competition. Choice should be according to your domain authority and ranking power.

Going back to the basics.
For keyword research, you will enter your main keyword in Google Keyword Planner. This tool returns you the search volume of the keyword.

Finding the keyword competition is more important than choosing a keyword with great search volume. Competition levels given by the Google Keyword Planner are not correct.

How to make Google Keyword Planner display correct keyword competition?

Many bloggers, including me, miss out a thing. Filling out "landing page" while doing keyword research in the Google Keyword Planner.

Enter your target blog URL. By this, Google considers the ranking power of the site, while displaying the competition.

That means it's like saying to Google, "Please give me the keyword competition and ideas for the site I have mentioned below".
Now, the keyword competition in Google Keyword Planner will be somewhat right.

Make use of Domain Authority

When it comes to authority there are two things. Its domain and page authority. Page authority is the ranking power of a single page. Domain authority is for the whole domain. D.A defines the ranking power of the entire domain, including all its pages.
Also read: How to Increase Domain Authority and Get Recognized

By looking at the domain authority, you can easily judge the ranking power of a particular site.

In this section, I will be using domain authority. It helps accurately find the keyword competition.

To carry out the process. First, you need to know the D.A of your own site. Now, you have to find the domain authority of your own site, you need to visit Open Site Explorer, and enter your domain in there.

Remember this before following the below steps. Google honours domain authority while ranking sites. However, there is no rule that – the top 10 domains for a search query in SERPs should have their domain authorities in descending order. However, most of the times, it is.

Follow the steps below:

Carry out the keyword research process, and find up to 10 effective keywords that you are interested to blog upon.

Now, you need to accurately find the competition for those keywords.

To continue the action, you need to install MozBar for your browser. It displays the D.A, P.A, etc. for all the search results in SERPs.

Take a keyword among those keywords, search for it on Google.

Take note of domain authority of all the sites that are ranking for your keyword in SERPs.

Analyze the Google top 10 results for your keyword. If there are no sites that have D.A close to yours, then you can say that the competition for that keyword is high.

If in those results, there are few sites with D.A near to yours, then it is clear. You too can rank for that keyword.

Observe the below image, to get it better.

You can notice in the image, the top 10 domains are not strictly in order of domain authority. It is because domain authority alone is not a single ranking factor of Google.

Most of the times the top 10 results are in descending order of the domain authority.

Look at the above screenshot. You may notice that my blog "Go Blogging Tips" is ranking above "BeginnersBook", although the D.A of my blog is low. It is because my blog is purely "blogging and SEO blog". However, Beginners Book covers all the topics from coding to SEO.

Google concluded, "This (my) blog is particularly about "SEO and blogging", this blog post may have more in-depth content on LSI keywords."
Another reason may be the optimization difference.

Using keyword difficulty checker

Moz and other tools like SEMRush help you find how difficult it is to rank for a keyword.

Moz

SEMRush

It ranks the difficulty of keyword rankings in 0 to 100 scale. Higher the score, difficult is to rank for that keyword.

Apart from these, there are separate keyword difficulty checkers like Moz Keyword Difficulty. If you don't have link-assistant or rank tracker, you can download it. It also has the awesome feature of keyword difficulty.

To conclude…Accurate competition for a keyword can't be found. The above tricks help you find the keyword competition that is near to the term "Accurate".

Above tricks help you find competition of keywords. Results are about 70% correct.

Always remember to check keyword competition while targeting keywords. It helps you drive traffic from every of your blog post.

I hope this post has helped you. Do share and comment.

DISCLOSURE

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning that if you click on one of the links and purchase an item, we may receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). All opinions are our own and we do not accept payments for positive reviews.

This is great post.I like your articles and your articles are so easy to understand because it is written in so easy language .Very nice tutorial on how to accurately determine keyword competition in SEO. There are many webmasters who share this kind of tutorial but don’t share in a good manner. They make things complicated. I love your style how you shared everything in a good manner.

Great post! I was looking for one such guide that which lead me to the selection of keywords more properly so that I can get some organic traffic from Google. It's not only getting traffic, but ranking.

I'll try this method of keyword research the next time I write up anything on my blog. You really helped me bro! Thanks!

About Akshay Hallur

Hi, I’m Akshay Hallur. The founder of this blog GoBloggingTips. I’m a professional full-time blogger, an internet marketer, and a trainer. I’m here to help bloggers like YOU to create an outstanding blog and earn money from it.